Hand crafting

Some people make music. Some, such as, Rolf Nesse and Anthony Powell, take it even further. They design and construct the actual musical instruments. Powell builds mandolins, guitars and harp guitars. Nesse, of Coeur d’Alene, makes cellos and violins. Nesse, a Group Health physician, began making instruments because his wife, Annie, unexpectedly took up the cello.

“I wanted to buy a cello. The one I liked was $10,000 minimum,” Annie Nesse said. “When you get a good instrument, there’s no work involved. You want that quality, (but) can you afford it? That’s how he started.”

Nesse, who is not a musician but had built furniture, decided to practice by first making a violin for his daughter.

“I had a book. I built this little cheesy thing,” Nesse said. “It worked. (My daughter) played it for years.” Then he built the cello, which is still used, now by one of his wife’s music students.

Powell, of Athol, started making instruments when some furniture-grade mahogany fell into his lap. His father had found the wood at a house in Sandpoint. “He said it was scrap wood. I said it’s guitar-building wood,” Powell recalled. “I built a mandolin out of that wood.”

Then he built a harp guitar for his brother, Dave. “I wanted one of those, but you can’t go and just buy a harp guitar. They’re hard to come by,” Dave Powell said.

Anthony Powell has built approximately 20 instruments, including mandolins, mini guitars and harp guitars. He built his father a tenor guitar out of old wooden wine crates. Making instruments is an extension of his involvement with music in general.

The brothers have been into music for years. Dave Powell played trumpet and was in a rock band in high school. Anthony Powell taught himself to play bass guitar. Together they write and compose music, sell CDs and perform at local events. They perform under the name Rex James, a compilation of their middle names. They have planned a tour to Oregon and California.

Anthony Powell makes the instruments they play in their performances and on their CDs.

“We’ve moved toward only using handcrafted instruments because of the uniqueness of the sound,” he said.

He learned how to build instruments from the Internet and sought advice from Vintage Guitars in Post Falls. He started out using his father’s woodworking shop but now has his own in his garage. The brothers built two jigs used to form the instruments.

Nesse has made more than a dozen instruments including a full-size bass, several violins and a bass guitar. He built an “experimental” bass, a skinnier version of the large instrument.

“When you make them, until you’re finished, you don’t know what you’ve got,” Nesse said. “You have to understand how to work the wood.”

He added that the sound of an instrument changes over time as the vibration of the music seasons the wood. “After one to two years of playing, every well-made instrument gets better.”

Creation of an instrument starts with a mold, a pattern. Wood is bent around it to take on the shape of the instrument. Front and back panels have to be carefully carved to the proper arch and thickness. There are hand tools for the process, but Nesse also uses a power tool to speed it up.

Both Nesse and Powell build instruments for family and friends. Powell has sold three pieces but doesn’t have a product line yet.

Nesse built a bass for a friend, incorporating a bullet that was imbedded in the wood. The wood, black walnut and spruce, came from trees in Oregon. Nesse split the bullet in half and glued it back on the bass. His friend calls it the “bullet bass.”

Nesse gets a lot of his wood from the hardware store. One instrument is named “Ziggy” after the store where its wood came from.

Besides continuing to build his instruments, Anthony Powell and his brother plan to continue to perform and make CDs, which are available through their Web site, www.rexjames.com. They are interested in doing tutorial CDs, teaching others how to build mandolins or how to modify a cheap guitar to improve the sound.

Nesse says his instrument building has been an interesting hobby and he wants to just continue to improve the quality of his instruments. “I’m not sure where it goes from here. It sort of has a life of its own.

“If you could keep going up the ladder and make nicer and nicer cellos. If you can make something that creates that kind of beautiful music, that’s as good as it gets,” he said.